Listen to the podcast of “Too Much Infotech,” Hendrik Hertzberg’s Comment on Anthony Weiner’s all-digital sex scandal.
Illustration by Tom Bachtell.
August 2, 2013
Fox News’s Don’t-Come-to-Jesus Moment
By now, you may have heard of the incident, quickly gone viral, in which a Fox News “on-air personality” raised questions about a revered if semi-mythical figure, with a combination of obliviousness and opacity and point-missing that set new standards even for Fox. I mean, of course, Brian Kilmeade’s inquisition the other morning about a new video of Bigfoot. “I’m looking at it and this could be Bigfoot,” Brian explained confidently, about a video in which a very, very distant brown figure might possibly be thought to be marching around like a man-ape in the British Columbia woods. “I’m almost convinced. Are you? And why don’t we ever zoom in?”
Meanwhile, there was, yes, also that other, more predictable incident in which Fox News’s Lauren Green, in an interview with Reza Aslan, wondered how he, as a Muslim, could have had what in the first-century Temple would have been called the chutzpah to write a scholarly book about Jesus. Aslan, to his credit, kept his patience and his equilibrium, and tried to remind Green that scholars generally try to avoid bias by consulting sources, examining texts, submitting to the rigors of critical inquiry, etc. She looked singularly unimpressed, as if he had been trying to sell her on the idea that Obamacare didn’t involve supplying government-made pillows with which to smother Grandmom.
Continue Reading >>August 1, 2013
Robert Mugabe Won’t Go
Early returns are showing that Zimbabwe’s election on Wednesday, the country’s seventh since it gained its independence, in 1980, has once again conferred the glory of victory onto Robert Mugabe, who is now eighty-nine years old. Even before the polls closed, Mugabe’s political opponents were claiming that there had been widespread vote rigging, including the disenfranchisement of up to a million voters. On Thursday, Morgan Tsvangirai, Mugabe’s comparatively youthful rival (he is sixty-one), called the election “a huge farce.”
Mugabe, who has led Zimbabwe for thirty-three years, seems determined to die in office. Indeed, few politicians in modern times have been as willfully enduring or as spitefully determined to hang around, wraithlike, as Mugabe. (A notable exception is Fidel Castro, though he did step down, in 2008, after forty-nine years in power.) Earlier this week, Mugabe, the Emperor Palpatine of African politics, gave a press conference in Harare, flanked by stuffed lions and cheetahs, in which he promised to “surrender” if he lost the election. But, when speaking to Lydia Polgreen, of the Times, he scoffed about his age being a political liability: “The 89 years don’t mean anything. They haven’t changed me, have they? They haven’t withered me, they haven’t made me senile yet, no. I still have idea, ideas that need to be accepted by my people.”
Continue Reading >>July 31, 2013
How Egypt Will Shake the World
In late 1991, amid the worldwide wave of elections that followed the end of the Cold War, Algeria’s military-backed government held a national vote and very reluctantly invited a coalition of previously repressed Islamists to take part. That coalition, the Islamic Salvation Front, showed strength in the election’s first round. The Army and its secular-nationalist allies in politics feared that the Islamists might win outright, so they cancelled the final vote, cracked down on the Islamists, and ignited a civil war that lasted a decade and claimed tens of thousands of lives. Ultimately, the military won that war.
When the history of recent democratic or pluralistic aspiration in North Africa is written, Egypt’s chapter since 2011 may be remembered similarly, with the exception that its military did not cancel an election but instead allowed the Islamists to rule for a haphazard year before repressing them again.
Continue Reading >>July 30, 2013
Another Citizens United—but Worse
Think the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United was bad? A worse one may be on the horizon.
To recognize the problem, it’s necessary to review some of the Court’s gnarled history on the subject of campaign finance. In Citizens United, which was decided in 2010, the Court rejected any limits on what a person or corporation (or labor union) could spend on an independent effort to help a candidate win an election. Thus the rise of Super PACs; that’s why Sheldon Adelson could spend sixty million dollars to help Mitt Romney in 2012. But, though Citizens United deregulated independent expenditures on behalf of candidates, the case said nothing about direct contributions to the candidates themselves.
Continue Reading >>July 29, 2013
Podcast: Motown Down
Listen to the podcast of “Motown Down,” John Cassidy’s Comment on not giving up on Detroit.
Illustration by Tom Bachtell.
July 26, 2013
Breaking Out of Abu Ghraib
Abu Ghraib, again. The notorious prison, on the outskirts of Baghdad, is back in the news, with Al Qaeda’s spectacular breakout of more than five hundred of its members who had been imprisoned there. This is not the first time that its doors have been opened in a manner that is more of a threat than a reprieve. In October, 2002, after winning a hundred per cent of the vote in a Presidential election in which he was the sole candidate, Saddam Hussein celebrated by freeing tens of thousands of inmates from the prison.
I was reporting in Iraq at the time, as America and its allies geared up for war, and some Iraqis that I spoke to saw an ulterior motive in Saddam’s “gift to the Iraqi people,” as he termed his mass-liberation decree—namely, a plan to terrorize Iraqis with the prospect of thousands of hardened criminals, who could be mustered as shock troops, on the streets. When I asked Saddam’s Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, about it a few days later, he acknowledged that the regime hoped to be able to count on the “gratitude” of released prisoners if they were needed for Baghdad’s defense.
Continue Reading >>July 25, 2013
A Sermon on Race from National Review
The killing of Trayvon Martin has created no shortage of complicated reactions and unlikely alliances. Although many politicians and community leaders had called for the arrest of Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, they had mixed feelings about the state attorney leading the prosecution—and, quite likely, about prosecutors in general. Lots of the same people who believe that the criminal-justice system locks up too many defendants for too long were nonetheless aghast to see a jury give the benefit of the doubt to this defendant, this time. Meanwhile, many of Zimmerman’s staunchest defenders found themselves seized by a sudden concern for African-American murder victims in Chicago—as if violent crime in the Midwest should somehow cancel out the anguish over a dead boy in Florida. And the A.C.L.U. responded to Zimmerman’s acquittal with an embarrassing mixup: the organization couldn’t decide whether or not it wanted the government to consider trying him on federal charges.
Among the strangest reactions of all, though, was an essay, published on Tuesday, called “Facing Facts about Race.” It was published on National Review Online, the smart and lively Web site of the venerable conservative magazine. And its author was Victor Davis Hanson, a noted polymath whose fields of expertise range from military history to farming. Hanson framed his essay in part as a response to a speech given at the N.A.A.C.P.’s annual convention by Eric Holder, the U.S. Attorney General. Holder recalled the day his father sat him down for “a conversation—which is, no doubt, familiar to many of you—about how, as a young black man, I should interact with the police. What to say and how to conduct myself if I was ever stopped or confronted in a way that I thought was unwarranted.” Holder lamented that, in the wake of Martin’s death, he had felt it necessary to have a similar conversation with his own teen-age son.
Continue Reading >>July 24, 2013
The Royal Baby: Why Does America Give a Hoot?
These days, every self-respecting news operation needs a “royal expert,” preferably one who talks in the strangulated tones of an old-school English aristocrat. Monday evening, the birth of the still unnamed “Royal Baby” featured prominently in pretty much every media outlet (including this one) and the next morning it made the front pages of the Post and the Times, an honor usually reserved for mass murders and other disasters.
Why are Americans so interested in an overseas monarchy that has virtually no power, and which now functions primarily to attract tourists and boost Britain’s balance of payments? For someone who grew up in England but is no royal expert, and who has lived on this side of the Atlantic Ocean for more than twenty-five years, this presented a puzzle. Having been inspired by reading and writing about Gunnar Myrdal’s landmark study of American race relations, I decided to do some reporting.
Continue Reading >>July 23, 2013
America’s Star System
Last year, Bill Clinton earned seventeen million dollars giving speeches, including one before a company in Lagos that paid him seven hundred thousand dollars. Hillary Clinton will be paid two hundred thousand dollars for each speech that she gives to the likes of the American Society of Travel Agents and the National Association of Realtors. David Petraeus, the retired Army general and ex-C.I.A. director, was offered two hundred thousand dollars by the City University of New York to teach one course each semester and to give a couple of public lectures, until a small outcry from faculty and students embarrassed the university into reducing his salary to one dollar. CUNY’s swift retreat suggested that there’s something wrong with public figures commanding and getting spectacular fees for minimal work. But is there?
Continue Reading >>
